Quotes from Ray Bradbury

Fantasy? That's for the Fire Birds. Fantasy, even when it takes science-fictional forms, which it often does, is dangerous. It is escapist. It is daydreaming. It has nothing to do with the world and the world's problems. So said the snobs who did not know themselves as snobs.

The sun burned every day. It burned Time. The world rushed in a circle and turned on its axis and time was busy burning the years and the people anyway.

The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more 'literary' you are... The good writers touch life often.

He had felt a braveness which he had thought to be the genuine thing, and now he knew that it had been nothing but shock and the objectivity possible in shock.

Come on now, we're going to go build a mirror factory first and put out nothing but mirrors for the next year and take a long look in them.

People want to be happy, isn't that right? Haven't you heard it all your life? I want to be happy, people say. Well, aren't they? Don't we keep them moving, don't we give them fun? That's all we live for, isn't it? For pleasure, for titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of these.

It shouldn't work. It shouldn't be magic. You shouldn't weep happy and then sad and then happy again. But you do. And I do. And we all do.

I use a library the same way I've been describing the creative process as a writer — I don't go in with lists of things to read, I go in blindly and reach up on shelves and take down books and open them and fall in love immediately. And if I don't fall in love that quickly, shut the book, back on the shelf, find another book, and fall in love with it . You can only go with loves in this life.

And the odd think in Dad's voice was the sound truth makes being said.

Go, children. Run and read. Read and run. Show and tell.

In real life, as we know, the failure to relax a particular tension can lead to madness.

So now do you see why books are hated and feared? The show the pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, pore less, hairless, expressionless. We are living in a time when flowers are to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam. Even fireworks, for all their prettiness, come from the chemistry of the earth.

We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone MADE equal. Each man man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against.

In the morning he would not have needed sleep, for all the warm odors and sights of a complete country night would have rested and slept him while his eyes were wide and his mouth, when he thought to test it, was half a smile.

My dear, you never will understand time, will you? You're always trying to be the things you were, instead of the person you are tonight. Why do you save those ticket stubs and theater programs? They'll only hurt you later. Throw them away, my dear.

Millie? Does the White Clown love you?

He felt as if he had left a stage behind and many actors. He felt as if he had left the great séance and all the murmuring ghosts. He was moving from an unreality that was frightening into a reality that was unreal because it was new.

But that was another Mildred so deep inside this one, and so bothered, really bothered, that the two women had never met.

Not everyone born free and equal, as the constitution says, but everyone made equal.

Atibórralos de datos no combustibles, lánzales encima tantos hechos que se sientan abrumados, pero totalmente al día en cuanto a información. Entonces, tendrán la sensación de que piensan, tendrán la impresión de que se mueven sin moverse. Y serán felices, porque los hechos de esta naturaleza no cambian. No les des ninguna materia delicada como Filosofía o Sociología para que empiecen a atar cabos.

A story should be like a river, flowing and never stopping, your readers passengers on a boat, whirling downstream through constantly refreshing and changing scemery.

Their hands slapped library door handles together, their chests broke track tapes together, their tennis shoes beat parallel pony tracks over lawns, trimmed bushes, squirreled trees, no one losing, both winning, thus saving their friendship for other times of loss.

Where do we go from here? Would books help us? Only if the third necessary thing could be given us. Number one, as I said: quality of information. Number two: leisure to digest it. And number three: the right to carry out actions based on what we learn from the interaction of the first two.

Long before you knew what death was you were wishing it on someone else. When you were two years old you were shooting people with toy guns.